Noel Rappin Writes Here

So… The JavaScript book that I had contracted to do with Pragmatic will no longer be published by them.

I need to be careful as I write about this. I don’t want to be defensive – I’m proud of the work I did, and I like the book I was working on. But I don’t want to be negative either. Everybody that I worked with at Pragmatic was generous with their time and sincere in their enthusiasm for the project. Sometimes it doesn’t work out, despite the best intentions.

I haven’t spoken about this project publicly in a while because it was so up in the air. And also because I’m not sure what to say about it without sounding whiny or mean. And also because I was afraid of jinxing things, which is obviously less of an issue now.

Since November, the book has been in review and I’ve gone through a few cycles with Pragmatic trying to get things just right. The issues had more to do with the structure and presentation of the material then of the content or writing itself. I’m not completely sure what happened, but I think it’s fair to say that the book I was writing did not match the book they wanted in some way or another.

Anyway, that’s all water under the bridge. I have full rights to the text I’ve already produced. Self-publishing is clearly an option, though the phrase “sunk costs” keeps echoing in my head. It’s hard to resist the irony of starting with a Pragmatic contract and moving to self-publishing after having done it the other way around with Rails Test Prescriptions. I’m hoping to blog more – in addition to being a time sink, not being able to write about this book was kind of getting in my head about any blogging.

Thanks for listening, and watch this space for further announcements. I was excited about this project, and while this is disappointing, I’ll be excited about it again in a few days. Thanks to the people I worked with at Pragmatic for the shot, and thanks to all the people who have been supportive of this project.